Ok, I was wrong. The first question asked after my presentation was: "Don't you think you're abstraction architecture could be replaced by using VLAN's?" There was an akward pause before I finally choked out a simple "no." The questioner and I stared at each other until he realized there was nothing for me to expand on without asking him if he understood anything I had just said. He's a fine man, but his general comment to every presenter was that a firewall or router could achieve the same results. This was a very interesting conference and I will go into the itinerary when I can get my computer online and share a couple of cool pictures. This was an academic conference and these things are a world apart from the in-the-trenches technology conferences I usually attend. I was honored to be the only invitee from the private sector. While there were a few presentations that were purely academic and of no practical use to us technologists, I was very surprised and impressed by some of the presentations. If you've been in IT long, you'll appreciate hearing that many of these professors are interviewing former students and learning their horror stories ("What do mean you want me to start on the code maintenance team???") and introducing teaching models that actually get them used to silly things like refactoring and unit testing. There was an interesting forensics proposal to certify(?) backup software with one of 4 levels for thier ADS capabilities (yes, on Windows). There were several good ones on .Net things and about as many on Java things (the AJAX.Net was fun). What really got me excited were a few papers that were trying to address issues that really could be solved with my Transaction Clearinghouse and my friend FReD. That was a nice little validation of what I was presenting. The way they presented also gave me some new ideas about my Transaction Clearinghouse and possibly major improvements. Just enough to get my brain fired up. Ok, class dismissed. ------------ Hey, IT Audit fans, I just got some feedback from that client (I had sent them a type of questionairre) so I will finally conclude that piece and include what they told me about me.